An Insider's View of the Lodz Ghetto: the Photos of Henryk Ross

Henryk Ross (1910-1991), a photographer appointed by the Jewish Council in
the Lodz Ghetto in Poland, took thousands of photographs documenting life
in the ghetto. Kate Barrette has more on an exhibition displaying a
selection of the Lodz photos, which are being shown for only the second
time.

"Well, my name is Slesinger. I went to Lodz in 1941, together with
other Jewish people from Prague. There were five transports, and we were
in the second transport. I was 17 then, and I am 80 now. I was with my
father and mother, and only I survived."

Vera Slesinger was one of 5,000 Czech Jews sent to the Lodz Ghetto in
Poland during the Second World War. Only 227 Czech Jews survived the
experience and returned to Bohemia.

She and three other Czech Holocaust survivors were speaking about their
experiences at Langhans Galerie Praha which is holding a special exhibit
of photos on the Lodz Ghetto.

Dagmar Cujanova works at the gallery. She talked about the importance of
showing the Lodz images in Prague:

"It's a good opportunity to commemorate Czech Jews' suffering there.
It's also very important because Czech people don't know much about Lodz.
Almost nobody knows that so many Czech Jews went there."

The exhibit's black and white photos depicting life in the ghetto were
taken by Henryk Ross. Ross was a Polish Jew born in 1910 in Warsaw. He was
forced, like thousands of others, to move to the ghetto. But his experience
was unusual. The ghetto's Jewish Council appointed him as an official
photographer for the statistics department between 1940 and 1945.

In 1987, four years before his death, Ross wrote:

"Having an official camera, I was secretly able to photograph the
life of the Jews in the ghetto. Just before the closure of the ghetto in
1944 I buried my negatives in the ground in order that there should be
some record of our tragedy, namely the total elimination of the Jews from
Lodz by the Nazi executioners. I was anticipating the total destruction of
Polish Jewry. I wanted to leave a historical record of our martyrdom."

After the war, Ross returned to the same spot and dug up the 6,000
negatives.

The Langhans Galerie exhibit displays 50 of the 3,000 images that
survived. Many of the photos are painfully sad and familiar - Holocaust
scenes depicting executions, deportations, and mass starvation. Ms.
Cujanova talks about one particularly disturbing photo of a truck,
entitled 'Gas 1.'

"So this is Gas 1, which is a car in which people went to Chelmno. It
was a town near to Lodz. And during the way they were killed by the gas,
which went not out of the car but inside."

Many of the photos depict the horror and tragedy of life in Lodz. They are
images we have seen in history books and documentaries on the Holocaust.

The other half of the photos are strikingly unfamiliar within this
context. There are pictures of well-dressed children playing, of a
grandmother joyfully hugging her grandson, of a wedding reception. They
look like pictures from any family photo album, showing human love,
laughter and intimacy. But if you look closely, you see that all of these
family members wear yellow stars on their clothes.

These photos show the small minority of Jews in the ghetto who occupied
positions in the Jewish Council or its administration. They were the elite
of the ghetto - and as a result, fared relatively well when compared to the
mass of starving inmates.

Timothy Prus is the curator for the Archive of Modern Conflict in London,
which now holds the Ross photo collection. He has been working closely
with the photos over the last ten years, and has just edited a book on
Ross' work called Lodz Ghetto Album.

"Well, I was immediately struck by how much of the material didn't
conform to the images that we were used to, the images that had been
published in other books about the Holocaust up until that point. I
realized they were obviously something very interesting, but it took me a
long time to make sense of them and to contextualize them properly, and
that process is still going on, as time unfolds, the meanings in some ways
become clearer."

Mrs. Slesinger said these photos were difficult for her to accept. She
never saw these people or these kinds of scenes when she was in the
ghetto.

"It was very difficult for me to accept it. On the one hand I was
happy about this exhibition, because here most people went to
Terezinstadt, so people didn't know anything about the Lodz Ghetto, so I
was glad this exhibition is here. But then I saw the photographs, so I was
so shocked, that it really took me a long time to cope with it, I would
say."

Mrs. Slesinger talked about one of the photos in the exhibit, that of a
young Jewish boy dressed in a police uniform. He is holding a stick in his
hand and is playing with another boy.

"I was so shocked. First of all, I never saw people, never saw
children so well fed, so well dressed. And I thought my God, what could
the parents in the photograph, what thoughts could they have, to arrange
such a scene, and to let the boys play like that? It's one thing that I
simply can't get over, although I always say that it's not their fault -
they were the victims even so."

Chris Boot is the publisher of Lodz Ghetto Album, from which the selection
of photos for the exhibition was made.

"He used his camera to go out and document atrocities, risked his
life to record things he thought the world should know about, while also
getting on and photographing probably for people's private albums at the
time, weddings and gatherings and the social life of mainly the
administration staff, and they end up being some of the most poignant
photographs of all. Of course we know that nearly everybody recorded in
these photographs, died in Auschwitz or one of the other death camps of
the Holocaust, so they become these incredibly rare and precious things
that you can't help responding to."

The photos at the exhibit are moving from many different perspectives.
Both the historical content and the artistic quality of the photos are
striking. Mr. Boot discusses these two elements.

"Well, if you work in photography, you're always interested in single
bodies of work that function at a variety of levels and I think this is an
extraordinary and extremely important collection, because of what it
shows. It is arguably the most extensive single collection by any single
photographer on any aspect of the Holocaust. It's the work of a really
good photographer, the guy had a photographic vision, and there's a
quality to the work which makes the images incredibly fresh to experience
today."

While the negatives lay buried in the ground of the Lodz Ghetto, they had
to fight to survive. Water crept in and damaged many of the photos. But
observers, like Ms. Cujanova and others, agree that the water damage you
see when looking at the photographs, in the form of black rings and
splotches around faces and families, adds to the overall meaning of the
pictures.

"It makes the pictures even stronger when the damage to the photos is
not repaired, because this feeling of damage, in connection with portraits
of people who were shortly afterwards killed, is really a strong
combination."

You can see Ross' photos at Langhans Galerie Praha and attend the
accompanying programme until February 19. After this, the photos will
travel to Amsterdam, Milan and Lodz. See www.langhansgalerie.cz for more
information.